Category: Photography

Categories
Critters Photography

Babies

The St. Louis Zoo had an exceptional year when it came to zoo babies. As a Christmas treat, I give you the cute, the furry, the frolicking, and the fun.

Grevy Zebra

Kalama was born in August, 2008. There are now only 2,200 Grevy’s Zebras in the wild, but there’s a healthy population in zoos. The same can also be said of our next baby, a giraffe who was famous literally from birth.

new giraffe

Typically giraffes will give birth in private, but not this time. This little guy was born in June, in front of an audience of hundreds. There’s even a YouTube video of his birth.

The St. Louis Zoo giraffes share an enclosure with Speke’s gazelles and the zoo’s sole ostrich. The ostrich and the baby have had a fascination each other from the beginning, and will take turns following each other around the enclosure. However, both are motivated by curiosity, not friendship, as the ostrich will peck at the giraffe, and the giraffe kick at the ostrich. However, neither hurts the other and they do seem to keep each other entertained.

friends

the giraffe family

Domestic asses are common, but wild asses are critically endangered. That’s why the zoo’s breeding program is so important. And successful, too! The zoo didn’t have one Somalia Wild Ass baby this year, it had three, including this little one, born in June.

somalia wild ass

The President of the zoo, Dr. Bonner, wrote that one of the problems the zoo has with the Somalia Wild Ass is their name— leaders of school groups aren’t sure about saying their name because of the negative connotations associated with “ass”. After reading this, every time I stop by the enclosure I chant, “Say it loud, say it proud: Ass! Ass! Ass!”

I have not been kicked out of the zoo. Yet.

tiger cubs

The stars this year at the zoo have been the five Amur tiger cubs born April 28, and named Peter, Ivan, Andrea, Zhanna, and Tikva. The two males and three females have consistently been a hit with the crowds, and no wonder: they’re fascinating to watch. If you’re not familiar with Amur tiger, this species was originally named the Siberian tiger. They’re the largest cat in the world, and one of the rarest, so these five babies were greeted with relief, as well as delight.

cubs

cubs in water

cub

wrestling cubs

The cubs’ Mom, Kalista is a first time mother, but has proven to be exceptional— managing to care for her rather large brood with only a small assist from the veterinary staff for a couple of the lower weight cubs.

mom and child

mother and cub

Then there’s Sofiya. Sofiya is an Amur Leopard cub, the rarest cat in the world. She was a twin, but her brother did not survive birth. In addition, first time mother, Mona, rejected her daughter, and so Sofiya was hand raised by zoo staff.

Sophie1

Sophie2

Sofiya is lovable and charming, playful and clever. She’s fearless and funny, and astute and will stalk birds flying overhead and enamored photographers with equal enthusiasm.

Being stocked by my little girl

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year.

Categories
Photography Weather

Autumn

Autumn has finally arrived in our year of odd weather. We’re ten degrees above normal, but should return to 60s by Thursday. We’re in the 4th wettest year on record, and if we get our normal rainfall for the rest of the year, we’ll end up the wettest year on record.

Color path

We’re also a toss up in the election, and I’ve fielded over 20 calls today from various organizations. Can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone campaigning in our state. I think Obama and his wife are in the state tonight, Biden was here yesterday, Palin Monday, I hear a rumor about Rudy Giuliani, though I don’t think McCain’s been here. That’s because Palin is more popular here than he is.

color lake

All over by Wednesday, when we can sink back into our normal obscurity. In the meantime, all our visitors have been seeing the state at its best. I wonder if they’ve even noticed?

more color

Categories
Photography

Rusty flowers

Finally, after a summer of high humidity and warm temperatures, and seemingly endless crowds, yesterday brought a return to the St. Louis that I know and love. The temperatures were cool, the sky darkly overcast, and with the threat of rains, the people stayed home. A perfect day to visit the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

The flowers are ending their reign at the Gardens, but without passing their baton on to the trees. I thought with all the rain we had this year, we’d have a great autumn. However, it turned out we had too much water. The trees developed leaf rot, and most trees are just dropping their leaves. Still, there was still a little color yesterday, including the last of the dahlias. Such a floozy of a flower—wanton, shameless.

Bright orange dahlia

Nothing like the last of the sweet, demure roses. Mama Nature’s precious little princesses.

purple roses

Yesterday had all the elements to make a perfect picture day. Not picture perfect, perfect picture. Overcast skies brings out the richness of the colors, and reduce the harsh highlights, and dark shadows that sunny days bring. The Gardens were almost deserted, which always seems to bring out the magic that hides away when the crowds come around.

Taking pictures in a local place removes the stress of having to find the perfect shots to capture the scene before you quickly move on to the next. The Gardens are beautiful, but not so much that the photos take themselves. It’s hard to screw up a photo of the Grand Canyon, which kind of removes all the fun of even trying. Either the photo will be great, but it’s the Grand Canyon. Of course the photo is beautiful. Or the photo will be awful, invoking thoughts of how could anyone possibly take a bad photo of the Grand Canyon? No, the Gardens are just interesting enough to provide possibilities, but with no guarantees.

fading flowers

Oh what joy, too, to walk around the Park talking to all of the critters without having to worry about whoever is around to overhear. I’ve thought about getting a fake cellphone with ear buds, so that I when I talk to animals, or myself, people will just assume I’m talking on the phone. However, such action is a lie, and uncomfortable, too—and how can you hear the birds with your ears stuffed? No best be thought mad, than rude.

If all the rain this year threatens to rob us of a colorful fall, it made up for it by providing a rich bounty of berry and nut for the animals this year. The fruit bearing trees, like the Japanese crab apples, were practically falling over, so loaded with fruit. To add to yesterday’s magic, a huge flock of robins, preparing for their migration, filled the woodlands, stuffing themselves on a cornucopia of rich offering. I wondered the feather balls could still fly.

fat robin

The birds weren’t the only animals out enjoying the bounty of the fall harvest. The other day I was at the zoo when I saw a chipmunk with its cheeks so full, its little head was weighed down and almost dragging on the ground. Yesterday, nothing was going to stop the squirrel I met up with from finishing its luscious nutmeat—remnants of earlier meals scattered about as crumbs.

squirrel and meal

With such delights scattered about, I wasn’t surprised to come upon a red tailed hawk, but the one yesterday was different than others I’ve met over the years. It didn’t fly off as I approached it with camera, and seemed as interested in me, as I was in it. If I truly believed in magic, I could imagine a prince in flowing white velvet and copper, ensorcelled into the shape of a bird, just waiting a princess to see the humanity looking out from hawk eyes.

hawk giving me the eye

If so, the poor prince would be disappointed in me, because I would prefer bird to prince.

disappointed hawk

Categories
Photography Weather

Soggy state

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The majority of my photos posted recently are from the Missouri Botanical Gardens, or the St. Louis Zoo. I’ve not explored outside of the St. Louis area this last year primarily because of all the rain and flooding we’ve had. Though I was not, personally, directly impacted by the flooding, I’ve been indirectly impacted because of the extremely high mold content. I wasn’t aware until recently that I’m allergic to mold pollen, go figure. Add to this my allergic reaction to even the most innocuous Missouri bug bites, and I’ve spent most of the summer on paved paths and close to home.

A happy byproduct of my restricted explorations, though, is how much I’ve come to look beyond the obvious in my local walks at the St. Louis Zoo. So much so that I’m starting a new category of writings on the Zoo over at my personal web site, Just Shelley. There is much we can learn about ourselves, as well as the animals, at a zoo.

In the meantime, I have been posting photos from both the Botanical Gardens and the Zoo to the MissouriGreen image galleries. Posted below are some representative examples. Now that the weather is getting cooler, I may expand my explorations again, perhaps even include some fall color photos.

From the Gardens:

yellow flower

pink dahlia

little bug on hedge rose

The Gardens aren’t just flowers and insects, as these snakes sunning themselves on branches demonstrate:

snake on branch

snake on branch

A few photos from the Zoo:

white pelican on lake

snow leopard

silverback lowland mountain gorilla

Categories
Graphics/CSS Photography

Gimp 2.6 alive and well on the Mac

GIMP 2.6 is now available on the Mac OS X, in addition to both Windows and Linux. On the Mac, you can install it via Macports, or you can use a pre-built version of the application, available for both Tiger and Leopard. I have the Macports version on my Leopard machine, the pre-built on my Tiger laptop.

First impressions of the newest version is that I like the improvements to the user interface. The original application (Toolbox) toolbar has now been merged as part of the image window, simplifying the interface. The application is still a MDI, or Multiple Document Interface, but it’s simple to keep all of the tool’s components visible.

The necessary photo enhancement tools are all present and accounted for, including Layers, Curves, and the all important Gaussian blur, as well as several of the other handy enhancing tools. The application still interfaces with UFRaw, the separately accessible open source tool that provides RAW image pre-processing.

One of the new additions to Adobe’s Photoshop CS4, I gather, is the addition of seam carving whereby the tool can determine where pixels can be compressed and still maintain most of the image’s integral look. GIMP 2.6 also incorporates a plug-in known as Liquid Rescale that is based on the same algorithm. I didn’t have a photo with a long, unending beach, but I did have a photo of a bright red mumdahlia. Following are two versions of the photo, a before and after scaling with Liquid Rescale.

Red Mum before

Red Mum after

The red flower is distorted, which isn’t surprising. However, the bud, leaves, and even some of the background are relatively untouched. Interesting effect. The plug-in’s web site has examples that show how to use Liquid Rescaling to enhance photos without obvious distortions.

Another major change with GIMP 2.6 is the addition of the GEGL (Generic Graphics Library). From the GIMP 2.6 release notes:

Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL.

There’s also a GEGL tool, which provides access to several operations, though I’d use caution when applying any of the operations to a large, RAW image. Among the more familiar of the operations is an unsharp-mask; among some of the more interesting is the whitebalance operation, demonstrated in the following snapshot.

The new modifications for GIMP 2.6 go beyond making our photos prettier. The new Brush Dynamics feature is a kick to play with, and one can see how it would be useful when creating specialized effects. With the Dynamics, I can create a wonderfully fun fairy sparkle effect, just by setting the pressure, velocity, and random settings for the brush opacity, hardness, size, and color.

Some of the more popular plug-ins, such as the Layers plug-in, which emulates the Photoshop layer effects capability still have not been ported to 2.6. Most of the effects, however, can be created by scratch until the plug-ins are updated. Plus, there’s enough to the basic tool, including the new GEGL operations, and the Brush Dynamics to keep one occupied for hours.

GIMP isn’t the tool for everyone. If you’re proficient with Adobe Photoshop, work in an operating system in which Photoshop is released, and can afford the rather expensive upgrades, you should stay with Photoshop. However, with today’s troubled economic times, and an increased interest in being frugal, you can’t beat GIMP 2.6’s price: donate what you can to the project. In addition, the new Photoshop CS won’t run on many older Mac architectures, including both my Leopard and Tiger laptops.

Paired with UFRaw, you have what you need to do sophisticated photo processing with GIMP. And with all of the graphics plug-ins, filters, scripts, and so on, you can do most other graphics work with the tool, as I hope to demonstrate more fully in the future.